FlashFood Turns Restaurant Leftovers into Meals for the Hungry

FlashFood is a SMS-based social media service created by a team of six Arizona State University students that aims to secure restaurant leftovers for some of the 48.8 million Americans faced with food insecurity at home.

The innovative yet simple service was the winning software design entry in Microsoft's US Imagine Cup, a student technology competition.

FlashFood is designed as a food recovery network, allowing restaurants or caterers with excess food at the end of an evening to send a notification to the network's volunteers, who pickup and deliver the food to a local community center. At the same time, a notification is sent to the hungry that lets them know there are meals available for pickup, also letting them know where.

Following the success at the US Imagine Cup, the team will now work on building a network of food insecure individuals, while they also plan to operate on a hybrid nonprofit/for-profit model.